Translations:MPI/1/en
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A Primer on Parallel Programming[edit]
To pull a bigger wagon it is easier to add more oxen than to find (or build) a bigger ox.
—Gropp, Lusk & Skjellum, Using MPI
To build a house as quickly as possible, we do not look for the fastest person to do all the work but instead we hire as many people as required and spread the work among them so that various construction tasks are performed at the same time --- "in parallel". Computational problems are conceptually similar. Since there is a limit to how fast a single machine can perform, we attempt to divide up the computational problem at hand and assign work to be completed in parallel to multiple computers. This approach is important not only in speeding up computations but also in tackling problems requiring large amounts of memory.